Part XV
In a speech in front of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (AACI) on March 11, 1946, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency, placed the Jewish people’s return to their ancestral homeland in perspective: “We are not here on the strength of the Balfour Declaration or the Palestine Mandate. We were here long before. I myself was here before. Many thousands were here before me, but we were here long, long before that. The Mandatory Power is here on the strength of the Mandate speaking legally from the legal point of view.”
As he previously explained, the establishment of the Jewish state began with the founding of Mikveh Israel in 1870, when Alliance Israelite Universelle, the French philanthropic organization, established the first agricultural training school for Jewish youth and an elementary research center outside Jaffa.
No Absolute Justice
In testimony before the AACI, Chaim Weizmann observed, “There is no absolute justice in this world… and what we are all trying to do in our small way, is just rough human justice… Injustice there is going to be.” Nevertheless, the Arabs emerged from World War II with at least two kingdoms, four republics, six seats in the U.N. and one in the Security Council. Weizmann questioned whether this was commensurate with what the Arabs contributed during the war. How many fatalities did they sustain? To what degree did they suffer?”
“If you compare the Arab experiences with the suffering, casualties and the Jewish contribution to the war effort,” Weizmann said, then “there may be some slight injustice politically if Palestine is made a Jewish State, but individually the Arabs will not suffer. They have not suffered hitherto. On the contrary, economically, culturally, religiously, the Arabs will not be affected.”
Weizmann urged the U.N. to tell the Arabs: “Gentleman, whatever you have got out of the last war, you owe to our arms and to our sacrifices; whatever you have got out of this war, you equally owe to us. It would have been otherwise if Hitler had won the war!” In particular, Weizmann felt the Arabs were indebted to the Allied Powers in both World Wars. “Surely to goodness,” he said, “if the Allied Powers found it just to give what Mr. Balfour called this ‘little notch’ for the Jews to live there as a nation, they have a right to expect the Arabs to accept it?” Weizmann had asked Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to make this point so that Arabs and Jews would be spared a “great deal of trouble.” Like the U.N., however, they chose not to articulate a “firm and definite policy.”
‘The Test of War’
Richard Crossman, a British Labor MP who served as a member of the AACI points out that the Jews of Palestine had proven to the West they were undeniably a nation after having been forced to fight and triumph in their war of independence. The only criterion of whether an ethnic community deserves nationhood, Crossman said, is the “test of war.” The war further demonstrated that Arab allegations of Israel being “a direct threat and a tool of Western, and then principally U.S. imperialism to divide, dominate and exploit the Arabs” were false. Had the Jews established a state with the help of the British, this would have reinforced the belief that Israel is merely a British colony that could not survive without British protection.
‘Three Eras of Jewish Independence’
Throughout the thousands of years of Jewish existence, there were only three eras in which we enjoyed independence, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained: eight decades during the reigns of King David and King Solomon; eight decades under the rule of the Hasmonaeans; and eight decades since the State of Israel was established. During this entire period, he said, “we never lost hope that we would return to our homeland, the land of Zion, where we would live in prosperity as free people. Having restored our independence, we cannot let anyone bring an end to this miracle.”
Role of the West
Before the establishment of the state, Reinhold Niebuhr, professor of practical theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York and one of the greatest Protestant theologians of the 20th century, was prescient in his analysis of the role the West should play in this conflict. What was needed, he believed, was resolve by the West in dealing with the Arabs that will not allow “any nation so conceived and so dedicated to perish from the earth.” He recognized, “The simple fact is that all schemes for political appeasement and economic cooperation must fail unless there is an unequivocal voice from us that we will not allow the state to be annihilated and that we will not judge its desperate efforts to gain some strategic security… as an illegitimate use of force.”
Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
